Increases in government spending trigger substitution effects both inter- and intra-temporal and a wealth effect. The ultimate impacts on the economy hinge on current and expected monetary and fiscal policy behavior. Studies that impose active monetary policy and passive fiscal policy typically...

A rational expectations framework is developed to study the consequences of alternative means to resolve the "unfunded liabilities" problem--unsustainable exponential growth in federal Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending with no plan to finance it. Resolution requires specifying a...

Farmer, Waggoner, and Zha (2009) show that a new Keynesian model with a regime-switching monetary policy rule can support multiple solutions that depend only on the fundamental shocks in the model. Their note appears to find solutions in regions of the parameter space where there should be no...

This paper reports the results of estimating a Markov-Switching New Keynesian (MSNK) model using Bayesian methods. The broadest and best fitting MSNK model is a four-regime model allowing independent changes in the regimes governing monetary policy and the volatility of the shocks. We use the...

This paper uses a detailed literature review and an empirical analysis of three models to assess the links among inflation and survey measures of long- and short-term expectations. In the first approach, we jointly estimate a model of inflation, survey expectations and monetary policy, where...

This paper assesses the implications for optimal discretionary monetary policy if the slope of the Phillips curve changes. The paper first derives a ‘switching’ Phillips curve from the optimal pricing decision of a monopolistic firm that faces a changing cost of price adjustment. Two states...

This paper makes changes in monetary policy rules (or regimes) endogenous. Changes are triggered when certain endogenous variables cross specified thresholds. Rational expectations equilibria are examined in three models of threshold switching to illustrate that (i) expectations formation...

The level and volatility of survey-based measures of long-term inflation expectations have come down dramatically over the past several decades. To capture these changes in inflation dynamics, we embed both short- and long-term expectations into a medium-scale VAR with stochastic volatility. The...

A growing body of evidence finds that policy reaction functions vary substantially over different periods in the United States. This paper explores how moving to an environment in which monetary and fiscal regimes evolve according to a Markov process can change the impacts of policy shocks. In...

Recurring change in a monetary policy function that maps endogenous variables into policy choices alters both the nature and the efficacy of the Taylor principle---the proposition that central banks can stabilize the macroeconomy by raising their interest rate instrument more than one-for-one in...